Linux Mint 13 Maya RC Released in Cinnamon and Mate Flavors

The Linux Mint blog has announced the release of Linux Mint 13 RC. This brings us closer to the final release of Linux Mint 13, which should be sometime during the last week of this month. The RC is polished, and looks crisp as seen in these screenshots from the Linux Mint blog.

This latest release of Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu 12.04. As Ubuntu 12.04 is an LTS release, so is Linux Mint 13, and it will be supported until April 2017. Linux Mint 13 RC sports the latest version of Cinnamon 1.4 and the Mate 1.2. While the Mate desktop is focused on productivity and is more mature, the Cinnamon desktop is a new product Linux Mint is trying to develop alongside its Mint distro. With such a large user base, Linux Mint has good testing grounds for its Cinnamon desktop.

Cinnamon was released in the last week of this January. It boasts of a better user experience than Gnome 3. It is based on the Gnome shell 3.2.1 released in October last year and borrows heavily from MSGE. Cinnamon is on a roadmap to creating a complete desktop environment ecosystem, thus making it a self-sufficient product unlike MSGE, which had no individual identity. Cinnamon has ambitious plans, and it will be interesting to see if it attracts more users for Linux Mint.

Intermediary releases of Cinnamon are available on GitHub in a “stable” branch. Get download links and more details for this RC release at the official Linux Mint blog.